Java Charset problem on linux

Question

problem: I have a string containing special characters which i convert to bytes and vice versa..the conversion works properly on windows but on linux the special character is no

Answer 1

Your problem is a bit vague. You mentioned that -Dfile.encoding solved your linux problem, but this is in fact only used to inform the Sun(!) JVM which encoding to use to manage filenames/pathnames at the local disk file system. And ... this does't fit in the problem description you literally gave: "converting chars to bytes and back to chars failed". I don't see what -Dfile.encoding has to do with this. There must be more into the story. How did you conclude that it failed? Did you read/write those characters from/into a pathname/filename or so? Or was you maybe printing to the stdout? Did the stdout itself use the proper encoding?

That said, why would you like to convert the chars forth and back to/from bytes? I don't see any useful business purposes for this.

(sorry, this didn't fit in a comment, but I will update this with the answer if you have given more info about the actual functional requirement).

Update: as per the comments: you basically just need to configure the stdout/cmd so that it uses the proper encoding to display those characters. In Windows you can do that with chcp command, but there's one major caveat: the standard fonts used in Windows cmd does not have the proper glyphs (the actual font pictures) for characters outside the ISO-8859 charsets. You can hack the one or other in registry to add proper fonts. No wording about Linux as I don't do it extensively, but it look like that -Dfile.encoding is somehow the way to go. After all ... I think it's better to replace cmd with a crossplatform UI tool to display the characters the way you want, for example Swing.